Philosophy of Physics Seminar (Thursday - Week 4, HT25)

Abstract: The engineer and historian of science George Smith (1938-2024) came to the history of physics relatively late in his career, but over three decades made fundamental contributions to the understanding of the history of the physical sciences. In particular, he argued that the achievement of Newton’s Principia Mathematica (1687, 1713 and 1726) was much more radical than his contemporaries and subsequent philosophers of science have acknowledged. Although Smith provided numerous novel observations on the content and function of the Principia, his central interest was in how Newton pioneered the development of a mathematical theory of attractions that could turn data into evidence, notably in the exceptionally complex case of celestial motions. In Smith’s words, ‘every systematic discrepancy between observation and theory, no matter how small, says something about the world’. In this talk I pick out what I take to be the most fertile areas of Smith’s research, and assess how his approach can invigorate future work in both history and philosophy of science.